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Contact: Linda Murrin
866-847-3405 x108
lmurrin@common-goal.com
For Immediate release
March 2013 Product Release
Elmhurst, IL (March 22, 2013) – Common Goal Systems, a leading developer of cloud-based software for schools, announces several enhancements to TeacherEase and SchoolInsight. TeacherEase is software for the digital classroom and includes: Learning Management System, Curriculum and Lesson Planning, and Standards-based Gradebook. SchoolInsight is a comprehensive student information system.
The new functionality includes:
Copy Curricula. Easily share teammates’ units, lessons, assignments, and resources. Quickly find curricula used by colleagues and pull it into your class(es). Either make a copy for yourself, or use the original and receive future updates to the documents. Also great if you teach many sections of the same course -- copy from yourself and updates can be applied to all sections at once.
Instructor Main > Curriculum > Copy
Add Fee Handling to Online Registration. Online registration is now “fee aware.” When parents register students for the upcoming academic year, fees can be automatically calculated, applied to student accounts, and parents can pay online with a credit card. The system handles waiver requests and free/reduced lunch applications. To reduce questions and errors, parents register all of their children from a single page, and are offered a checklist of steps to complete.
Main > Online Registration
Collaborative Discussions. The Learning Management System now supports comments on assignments to promote student collaboration and discussion. Students ask questions, write comments, reply to other’s comments, and generally discuss topics while doing their work. Instructors can moderate the discussion, hiding inappropriate comments to maintain a positive virtual classroom environment. Their comments are also highlighted to give them more importance. Enable this facility for each assignment. This is our first implementation of discussion threads, please feel free to provide feedback. We expect to spread this feature to many other area of the system.
Main > Assignments > Create
Main > Assignments > Edit
Main > Assignments > Comments (when comments exist)
Shared Lunchroom Features. We made improvements for smaller districts where multiple schools share a single lunchroom. This is common when an entire district is housed in a single building, but state reports separate out elementary and middle schools (and sometimes a high school too). Users can search and scan students within the entire district, and SchoolInsight will transparently “switch schools.” This will reduce the number of clicks required for fee/deposit creation, lunch order creation, and reporting. Let us know how you like this feature, we’ll probably expand it to other areas as well.
Main > Lunch > Fees
Main > Lunch > Fee Details
Main > Lunch > Account Balances
Main > Lunch > Account Statements
Main > Lunch > Daily Deposits
Main > Tuition/Fees > Fees
Main > Tuition/Fees > Fee Details
Main > Tuition/Fees > Account Balances
Main > Tuition/Fees > Account Statements
Main > Tuition/Fees > Daily Deposits
(IL Only) WINS Support. Added support for the new Web-based Illinois Nutrition System (WINS) National School Lunch Program (NSLP) file export. Easily export your daily lunch data to the state. Save time and avoid miskeying data by exporting daily lunch file rather than hand keying it for every date. Be sure to set a meal subprogram type for your meals to be exported to ISBE
School Main>Lunch>Meals>edit
District Main > Import/Export > Export ISBE Files > Wins NSLP Meal Count
Asynchronous Lunch Processing. We made further changes to this new functionality. Entering lunch orders could be intermittently slow, which was disruptive to the lunch line. To speed up lunch processing, we first save the lunch order to the browser’s local storage and allow users to continue scanning additional students. Those orders are saved to the server as a background process. The lunch line should keep moving even if the internet connection is less than perfect. If the computer crashes before the orders are saved to the server, the browser will restart the saving process next time you enter the lunch module. This feature is only available to users with modern browsers that support local storage.
Main > Lunch > Daily Food Orders
Improved Transcript Test Scores. Better use of space for test scores on students’ transcripts. More attractive test scores area.
Main > Grade Reporting > Generate Transcripts
Common Goal Systems (www.common-goal.com) provides web-based services for education. It provides SchoolInsight, an industry leading student information system and TeacherEase, software for the digital classroom. Using Software as a Service (SaaS), the company offers products via the Internet and is responsible for all system operation and maintenance. Founded in 2001, Common Goal Systems has hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
- Common Goal Systems, Inc Press Release, March 22, 2013
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